David Cronenberg's COSMOPOLIS

COSMOPOLIS = Death.   But in a good way.

COSMOPOLIS may be something of a masterpiece – but it is also a frustratingly hard to recommend, abstruse fucknugget of a film.  I’m not sure who I confidently tell to go see this film—and I can’t begrudge the opinion of someone who sees it and thinks its essentially the worst piece of trash they’ve ever encountered.  But I mean it when I say I loved it, and think it’s the most important Cronenberg piece since DEAD RINGERS.

This isn’t the commercial Cronenberg who served up Viggo Mortenson first as a small town angry-dad in A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE and then as a naked, showering Russian gangster in EASTERN PROMISES.   This isn’t even the body horror David Cronenberg who obsessively traced the intersection between the human body and technology in genre defining cult-classics like THE FLY, eXistenZ, and VIDEODORME.  This is closer to something David Lynch would create, although COSMOPOLIS’ brand of perversity is more the societal and less the individual and psychoanalytic.  But I mean that in so far as the stilted, stuffy, uncanny atmosphere that permeates the film – something’s rotten indeed in a very Lynchian kind of way.

And more to the point—it’s pure Delillo.  The match here between source material and director is—simply put—crazy good.  I’ve now read a lot of Delillo and COSMOPOLIS is pretty much like the rest; it’s your thing or it’s not.  If you like postmodern malaise and evocative acausality you’ve come to the right place.  If you like realism, explosions, or pat character arches you have not.

Very quickly – the plot of COSMOPOLIS is this (no real spoilers) – a rich young guy (Robert Pattinson) takes a cross town limo trip in New York City in order to get a haircut.  He’s waylaid on this journey several times—chance meetings with his new wife, rendezvous with various fuckbuddies, meetings with business associates, angry mobs of proletariat storming the streets, and finally the advances of two stalkers, seemingly out to take his life.  He finally makes it across town to get the haircut—well half the haircut.  That is, with some limited other surprises I won’t get into here, essentially it.  It’s not A TALE OF TWO CITIES.  It is, in fact, a tale of  just one – not New York, per se, but the Global Cosmopolis that has risen with increasingly-convoluted tenets of international commerce.  Banking on iPhones is only the beginning.

Ahh yes, so that’s the other thing COSMOPOLIS is about – finance.  I am hardly a finance geek and honestly neither is Cronenberg, you aren’t going to learn anything about the buying and selling of money.  See MARGIN CALL if you want a sharper indictment and/or critique of pecuniary matters.  MONEY here is a metaphor – COSMOPOLIS is more precisely about the depersonalization of wealth, the chasm between possession and satisfaction, and the problems that come out of satisfaction not met.  It’s also about DEATH—even with some intense sex scenes this is far more THANATOS than EROS—and that’s where Cronenberg beautifully comes into his own.

“Money has lost it’s narrative”  is a comment made by Pattinson’s character’s “chief of theory” during a business meeting in his limo (80% of the film takes place in the limo in fact, a directorial challenge that Cronenberg quite frankly knocks out of the park.  He puts on a clinic for interior work that maybe all filmmaking students should bear witness to).   It’s a deceptively simple statement.  And, as others have pointed out, it maybe even a little of a banal one.  But insofar that COSMOPOLIS is about this evolution of wealth it is also about losing one’s narrative in all ways, and the inchoate, spastic, violent atmosphere that results when we are left narrative-less (which is, in a purely theoretical mode, the very essence of the postmodern).  VIOLENCE NEEDS A MOTIVE, Pattinson reminds when confronting his would-be assassin—egging him on while intimating he won’t kill him because he doesn’t have “reason.”  

Cronenberg has already explored the history of violence, but here we get something infinitely more interesting—violence without history.  In fact, we get History without history.   The world and the city of Cosmopolis, are places where meaning and narrative have completely evaporated.  The edicts of  some ominous central organization (“The Complex”) tell our protagonist what to do, or warn him when he’s in danger (and the danger is vague -- is it a pie in the face, a rat thrown in protest, a bullet in the brain?).  He stumbles between encounters, acausally.  Sex is pleasureless, and money—whether he’s making or losing it—seems to matter little.  In a world where anything can happen, nothing really does – for although there are guns brandished and shots fired and affairs arranged and haircuts (half) received, little of it can be called story.  There is no history here, a state akin to death.  Watching COSMOPOLIS is experiencing death.

It’s exciting, weird, challenging, and—yes, indeed, highly academic.  COSMOPOLIS is certainly anti-entertainment—so meticulously unwatchable that it somehow goes back around to be highly engrossing.  If you’re looking for summer pop entertainment, see TOTAL RECALL.  This isn’t to say—you’re not smart enough for this shit—it is to suggest that you’re probably a much saner and happier person than I for wanting to be entertained at the movies.  No promises for that here.

But challenged, definitely.  Delillo by way of Cronenberg asks you to look into the monolith of global finance and experience the human alienation that the digitization and commoditization of wealth entails.   It can be seen as a psychological portrait of Occupy Wallstreet dissent.  It is my favorite movie of 2012 (so far).

POWER FAILURE: The Dark Knight Rises, Beats of the Southern Wild, The Newsroom

So, for the last month I’ve been in a hole studying and, occasionally, masturbating, so I apologize if I’m late to the party on some of these diatribes.  But honestly I’m just about done with Hollywood after three recent huge colossal disappointments—in my view anyway.  What’s worse—and alas, this is my destiny—I can’t find many people who agree with me.  Maybe Hollywood is just done with me.

So in no particular order, I want to discuss THE ABUSE OF POWER in Hollywood, through three particular endeavors. (and note, I mean Hollywood in terms of movie making in general, and how films are distributed to an audience)

BEASTS OF THE SOUTHERN WILD

I'm still waiting for that explicative conversation with one of the many people I know who loved BEASTS that will elucidate what I am missing on this one  This movie is everything bad about Terrence Malik without the saving grace of say a Emmanuel Lubezk or a Hans Zimmer.   It’s so utterly dripping with pretention that it’s  even more waterlogged than the world that first time, overhyped director Benh Zeitlin envisions “The Bathtub” to be.    It’s mind blowing that such uncouth poetics are here considered genius just because someone at Cannes decided that they are.  The homespun wisdom that young Quvenzhané Wallis offers in cloying voiceover is so ridiculously banal, familiar, and unstimulating.  Come on people, don’t fall for it!

Ahh, Quvenzhané Wallis.  Here is my gripe.  She is a fine young actress, I really look forward to her next role.  I love when  nonprofessionals are given a role like that, it’s like when someone comes up from the minor leagues and hits a home run—you can’t help but rooting for them.   But let’s call a spade a spade, gents – she was just fine.  She’s not the second coming of Christ-cum-Haley Joel Osment.  I think there is a major problem in American cinema with people grasping the quality of CHILD ACTING.  A child is either totally incapable of mature performance—in which case, they are given a pass as “just kids, doing their best”—or they are heralded as some sort of prodigy.  When was the last child actor who was just, you know, okay?  The Gary Sinise of child acting?  You know, it may have been Gary Sinise. Quvenzhané Wallis has gravity beyond her years, sure, and she was probably the best part of the movie for me, but that doesn’t mean the film wasn’t a stinker.  It was essentially stunt casting, the Gaboray Sibide of 2012, and precious in another sense too.  How can a thinking movie-goer fall in love with a character so utterly adorable, so morally upright, so tough?   What is complicated about Hushpuppy’s portrayal besides the fact that she stares deeply into the camera and she has possibly-gray eyes?   She shouldn’t have been called Hushpuppy, she should have been named UNDERDOG, because that is the only quality the filmmakers care about. 

Speaking of PRECIOUS, I also found this movie extremely racist.  What the fuck?  Just because there was white trash in the bayou as well doesn’t mean the whole thing wasn’t some post-Katrina guilt trip from a Wesleyan Educated child of academic “folklorists.”  Suck a dick, folklorists!  Your central metaphor—the BEASTS themselves who are periodically cut to and shown traipsing through the wilderness—are they after Hushpuppy?  Are they the Storm or the Saviors?—does not play out because they have nothing, nothing, nothing to do with the plot.  It’s such a facile, unfulfilling metaphor that the movie would be 10 times better without It’s another stunt.  The Warthogs—let’s call them what they are—are unsatisfying in every way.  The scenes of them interacting with the environment look like the culled Japanese Zord sequences from old School Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers episodes – slightly off kilter and somehow, even wordlessly, mistranslated.  I was so excited about this film going in because I knew about the Beasts sequences and was thrilled that there was gonna be some WEIRD in this movie. I love weird.  But the reason for the beasts never reconciles in any even quasi-intelligible way.  And even if it does—Fine the Beasts are Katrina.  Fine the beasts are the ever present threat of catastrophe.  Fine the beasts are what’s going to destroy us or save us or make us see or blah blah blah---even it does mean something it’s so hackneyed that again, I am floored by the positive response that so many critics have towards this film.

 I just don’t get it, and I swear I’m not being iconoclastic…or not purposefully so.  I really want to like this film but I find it snobby, unsubtle, manipulative, and mediocre.  I don't know how this director accumulated the clout, and money, to make this film -- and I don't begrudge him that he has talent.  I just hope the next movie he makes doesn't suck.  Like Lena Dunham, it makes you wonder how certain people get so much power in Hollywood, when great scripts by great writers sit unproduced for years.  While filmmakers with real vision and talent--we all know them--never "make it" at all.  It's upsetting.


THE NEWS ROOM

This is more uniformly loathed, so it’s a bit like shooting a fish in a barrel, but there is no worse show on television—and yes I’m including 2 Broke Girls—then Aaron Sorkin’s hilarious abortion THE NEWSROOM.

It moves the target off Lena Dunham anyway because, turns out GIRLS is the best new series on HBO this year. Damn.  THE NEWSROOM is so utterly misconceived I can’t stop watching it, if just to see the lengths—or shall I say depths—to which it will go to be blithely unentertaining.  It is totemic of Aaron Sorkin’s tremendously unchecked ego; it’s a Nicki Minaj album of a television series.  Did no one, HBO executives with whom I interact with sometimes, think to put even a modicum of check on this guy?  Why does he have such unlimited clout? Did someone lose a bet? 

Oh that’s right, NBC did - -when it aired STUDIO 60 ON THE SUNSET STRIP to disastrous results.  Did nobody learn a lesson?  Here’s an unfunny joke—STUDIO 60 was fucking amazing compared to THE NEWSROOM.   Aaron Sorkin’s fever dream of liberal truth-telling is like a bad one act story, dragged out over several hours of TV.   It’s a newsroom the way he wishes a newsroom was.  It’s the early 2000’s the way he wishes the early 2000’s went.  It’s the CNN he seems to think he’s better equipped to envision.  It’s the America Aaron Sorkin has made a brand out of, and it’s tired and crabby and dated. 

Jeff Daniels is annoying but he is ironically the best cast member of this motley crew of losers – I’m sorry but Alison Pill, who is a cutie, absolutely blows.  She’s a 26 year old intern in the pilot and then breaking high level stories in episode two—WHAT?  Dev Patel—our slumdog millionaire himself--surely they won’t make him just another Indian IT nerd…oh wait…Merde.   And the mechanics of the workplace sex comedy, while the cheerful engine of NEWSRADIO (one of my favorite shows) is just embarrassing here.  Nobody gets any work done they just argue silently behind glass walls, lace on-air speech with double-meaning innuendo, pine over a missed chance for an embrace, fight when they should kiss, kiss when they should fight.  It’s absurd to believe these people are producing the news every night, and insulting to the men and women who actually do. 

Make no mistake I am grossed out by Fox News and even so called “liberal news”  who readily jumps on whatever hyperbolic bandwagon is crossing the plains of American consciousness at any particular moment.  But I do not need Aaron Sorkin to tell me what a great newsman he can be.  In the latest episode a black republican gay staffer for Rick Santorum lashes out at Jeff Daniels for trying to presume that he shouldn’t be in Santorum’s camp because he is gay.  He claims: I do not need your help, sir!”   When, Mr. Sorkin, I do not need your help, sir, in defining my liberal values.  Your power in Hollywood has become unchecked, and your work is suffering for that.


THE DARK NIGHT RISES

Leaps and bounds better in every conceivable way then the last things things I’ve discussed, I still have to say I’m pretty disappointed with the latest from Christopher Nolan.  THE DARK NIGHT RISES doesn’t quite rise to THE DARK KNIGHT, a superb film and probably the director’s best.  And while it’s hard to expect Nolan to coax out another enthralling performance like Heath Ledger’s Joker, you do wish he did a bit more with what he had to work with. 

I like Anne Hathaway and I’m glad they made her good at karate—yay karate.  But I prefer my catwomen a bit more unhinged.  Michelle Pfeiffer nailed it way back when—catwomen should be BAD.  Nolan’s catwoman  is some misunderstood pick-pocketer—lame.  The character is underwritten and despite Hathaway’s gameness their isn’t much for her to do.  Tom Hardy also brings his A-game for Bane.  While I never loved Bane in the comics, I do love Tom Hardy – and I liked the vocal effects employed here very much.  Problem is, as has been pointed out to be by a number of people, obscuring a great actor’s face with a breathing apparatus does not a great performance make.  Also, without getting too much into plot here, I resented how they undermined Bane’s importance in the end by making him NOT the son of Qui Gon Jin (or whatever his name is).  It took sort of the center of everything and cast him aside for some meaningless twist.  That was ridiculous, you have to admit—even if you loved the film.

As was the scene in the prison Bane was born in, where he traps Christian Bale.  This prison is supposed to be utter hell on earth, a cesspool of scum and depravity, but in reality it’s sort of nice, isn’t it?  The lighting is great; it’s spacious.  The other inmates, all clean, cheer you on when you try to escape.  It’s a Rube Goldberg device to allow Christian Bale to summon the confidence to rise “psychologically” and then defeat Bane.  Why the hell didn’t they just kill him?   Or at least break his back (to appease fanboys).   Instead, he gets put in a nice jail which he can escape form if he wants it enough.  Sharks with friggen lazerbeams attached to their heads.  Well, guess what—eventually he wants it enough; eventually he escapes.  It’s a waste of our time as an audience; and uncharacteristic for Nolan a total  failure of mis-en-scene.  The jail could have been an amazing part of the story if it seemed sketchier and more horrible.

I think it’s hilarious that Rush Limbough points to the “liberal” attack on ‘Bane’ Capital in the movie—clearly he hadn’t watched it.  It’s actually hilarious, as THE DARK KNIGHT RISES is one of the most conservative moves I’ve seen in a long time.  It’s as conservative as BEASTS OF THE SOUTHERN WILD is liberal.  If this is our first OCCUPY WALL STREET cautionary fable it is clearly on the side of Wall Street….as Bane’s mob of lawless outsiders are flatly called evil and soulless.  The need for Law and Order isn’t tempered by some modern idea of ethical moderateness or egalitarianism; in the end, the police need to regain control and then, what, everyone is happy?  Do all of Bane’s men just call it a day?  Do the rich ladies that were hoisted out of their upper east side townhouses, stripped of their mink shawls (another hilarious, overstated inclusion), just go back to their apartments?

The answer is yes; as does Christopher Nolan, who establishes himself with the Batman trilogy as the director Hollywood will give any amount of money to he wants, because he proves he can make more.  Hence INCEPTION, a passion project that was so meticulous about making the implausible plausible that it failed to be entertaining.  While Nolan is certainly one of the best action directors out there, I’ll take a David Fincher film any day.  Budgets are a GOOD THING for films, especially in an age where the expense of filmmaking is already embarrassingly high.  BEASTS OF THE SOUTHERN WILD, for all its inanity, at least shows you when pluckiness and vision can accomplish if you pack up and move to New Orleans and go get ‘er done.  THE DARK NIGHT RISES illustrates that all the money in the western world can’t by itself replace a good script, a good design, and a good director in telling a good story.

Power corrupts and absolute power makes some shitty television and movies.